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Bruce Wasserstein's mandate to advise Carl Icahn, the US shareholder activist, on his battle with Time Warner may damage Lazard's relationships with other chief executives, according to the head of mergers and acquisitions at rival JP Morgan.

Wasserstein, chairman and chief executive of Lazard, accepted the mandate earlier this week.

Robert Kindler told a banking conference in New York yesterday: "I have no idea what Bruce Wasserstein was thinking when he took this assignment. It's very difficult to get chief executive meetings when there is any possibility that two weeks later you're going to show up with Carl Icahn rattling your cage at the company," Bloomberg reports.

A spokesman for JP Morgan declined to say whether the investment bank had worked with Icahn in the past or whether it would have accepted the Time Warner mandate if offered it.

Lazard declined to comment.

Icahn is working with a consortium of fund managers which together holds 2.9% of Time Warner including his stake. They are pushing to break up the company.

Speaking at the same conference Roy Smith, professor of finance at New York University and a former Goldman Sachs banker, said any stigma attached to investment bankers who represent corporate raiders faded in the 1980s and 1990s, Bloomberg reports.

Time Warner shares closed up 1% at $18.16 in New York valuing the company at $83bn (€70.93bn) and the Icahn consortium's stake at $2.4bn.